A tall, willowy, 27-year-old with a quizzical expression permanently fixed on his face, Ferris once worked as a part-time office boy at Channel 7's _Eyewitness News_, and there he came to the conclusion that "TV news is nothing but throwaway scraps, like sausages or hot dogs. ... Very little protein, like waste meat." Many of the skits he conceives have the same format as "straight" news items, but have been twisted by his imagination into something outrageous. In place of the standard weather reports, for example, there is Ferris' "Leather Weather Girl," in which a girl is tied to a table, her body representing a map of the world. The weather reporter, while telling about an impending onslaught of rain and snow, dramatizes his points by pouring a pitcher of water over the girl, smothering her with shaving cream, and finally applying a blow dryer to evaporate the messes while explaining that a warm air front will follow. Other skits include "Swedish Grease," "Music to Eat Rice By," and "The Adversaries," in which two actors wearing grotesque masks debate the question: should monsters be allowed to kill people, or just frighten them? Ideas for skits, says Ferris, come to him any time of night or day, now that he has "stopped working at any legitimate job. I watch a lot of television. But most of the time, I meander around the streets and just think. "I remember when I got the idea for the foreign language cursing detector. I was sitting on a bench in the park, smoking grass, when some foreign tourists came and sat down, and started talking about me in German like I was a bum. And I thought, why not have a portable siren that goes off whenever a swear word is spoken in any language?" He describes himself as "a very unregimented person who can't jive with the mainstream industry." This accounts for much of the spontaneity in _Waste Meat News_. The performers sometimes don't see the scripts until the taping session. Each segment requires several run-throughs before it is smooth enough to be filmed. Frequently the filming goes on far into the night. Although the show is done with a single camera and half-inch videotape, the final result makes up in charm what it lacks in professional gloss. "Maybe I'm a little rough in the way I produce it," says Ferris, "but I'm being a pioneer and I'm not worried about perfection as long as the audience has a positive reaction." His cast is an irregular group of about 15 unpaid actors and actresses, most of them young. Two current stars of _Waste Meat News_ are Pat Profito, a master of comedy who injects an infectious vitality into all of his performances, and Laura Suarez, a Strassberg-trained actress and former Playboy Bunny who frequently portrays the naive sexpot who crops up in many of Ferris' sketches.